I just don't see myself getting one of these UMPCs. They are way to big. I want something like the Nokia ITs. Small that I can put in my trouser-pockets. The only reason getting one of those is proper office applications. Oh wait. The missing keyboard... The EEE is way better for this and not much bigger. I just don't see the point of UMPCs...

For Intel'S MIDs I would wait and see. If you look at their promo stuff to this date... None of this stuff fits in my trouser-pockets. Also the moblin screenshots (their OS) are not very promising.

No, not really.
Most people don't need an UMPC,
but for people who like these gadgets,
there are some nice ones, the best one beeing the OQO 02 IMHO.

Don't forget that the Nokia 770 and 800 are not UMPC's,
but blown-up smartphones without (GSM) phone capability.


I'm glad my current UMPC is an XP machine.
This way I can use the full version of Firefox,
which never really made it into the Nokia 770.

And I can also use Emu48, my favourite HP-48 emulator.
X48 is _decades_ behind, so it's not a real alternative.


Not a real problem for me. My OQO 02 has a 60GB HD,
so I don't have to hassle with shitty small and expensive
Flash drives.

It also has 1GB of RAM, so these low memory conditions
usually occuring in the Nokia 770 don't ever happen.


That's right, they're still too expensive.
But after about two years of waiting for better devices,
and many frustrating experiences with the Nokia 770,
At some point I had enough from these promising devices,
like the 770, which never held what what they promised,
and took much of my time just to find out that they
would never be what was promised in the beginning.

So I finally bought an OQO Model 02.

Same footprint as the Nokia 770, double the thickness,
double the weight, but *MUCH* better screen, a very good keyboard,
and a real mouse replacement with left and right mouse buttons.

This thing simply works as expected, no crashes, and it is fast!

Ray

I meant that they are a failure (commercially and in other ways, but especially commercially) compared to the Asus Eee, not compared to the NITs.

(Because this category can't really be compared with the NIT. Tell me, how long can you hold that thing in front of your face using only one hand? But if on the other hand you don't mind a bigger and heavier form factor instead of a NIT, then more power to you.)

Got a refurbished Q1 vista for $300 a month ago, upgraded the ram to 2gb to do Vista justice. I must say that it made me appreciate my N810 even more. The 7" screen sounds nice, but the smaller N810 is actually crisper. The native 800x480 is not acceptable--with a 7" screen, why am I still doing horizontal scrolling? The input panel takes up almost the whole screen (although the hand writing input is pretty good). The battery lasts only slightly more than 2 hours. With the 2gb ram and the Pentium M processor, online video still not smooth. Unlike the N810 with its flip stand, I can't figure out how to hold it in my hands. The only good things are vga out and the joystick and D-pad on each side of screen that make Web page navigation easy. Overall N810 really has much better build quality. I am debating whether to put it on Ebay.

I bought a Q1 Ultra on ebay last fall. And then I promptly installed Ubuntu-UMPC on it. I forget which exact CPU it has ... it's faster/newer than a Pentium-M though (I think it's 800MHz, but it might be in the 1GHz range), 1GB RAM, and the 60GB HDD.

In some ways, it's like a giant N800, but with split-thumb keyboards, and some quirks.

The resolution on the Q1U is 1024x600, on a 7" screen, which I like. But the dpad isn't mapped as a arrow in Ubuntu-UMPC for some reason. It's used for certain function keys. Instead, the mouse/joystick knob is mapped as a mouse/dpad (in one mode, it's a mouse, in the other mode it's a dpad). It took me a while to figure that out, though.

My main frustrations have been:
1) Ubuntu-UMPC isn't nearly as polished as Maemo ... in some ways, I hope Mer is able to advance enough to replace it.

2) The 4 row keyboard makes number typing awkward. But, along with using my 5 row G1, it has at least convinced me that only 5 row keyboards are worth while. 3 row and 4 row thumb keyboards are, frankly, pointless. (the N810 is at least slightly better because it allows you to toggle a single button press as a number, where the Q1U only has a conventional numlock in this regard)

3) The external display, in mirror mode, only seems to support 800x600 and 1024x600. The former re-sizes the internal display. I don't know if this is the Q1U's fault, or Ubuntu-UMP's fault, but "letter boxing" doesn't seem like such a bleeding edge technology that no one thought "Hey, lets have the 1024x600 display capable of displaying on a 1024x768 monitor!" ... but apparently that concept is too advanced for anyone who was involved in the overall process. This pretty much keeps me from being able to use it on a KVM (but, I did figure out how to do a sort of "reverse VNC" process; I have a script which opens an ssh session on my mac, doing the opposite port forwardings that you'd usually do, and then running a local VNC server on the Q1U ... then the VNC client on my mac just connects to those local ports... not exactly like having it on a KVM, but good enough).

4) Screen rotation doesn't work. The mouse and touch screen's x and y axis' don't properly re-map during the rotation, and it becomes impossible to casually use the screen, and difficult to use it enough to un-do the rotation. So it's basically a useless option for the Ubuntu software to offer. Which is a shame: being able to use google reader on a rotated screen would have been rather nice.

But, otherwise, it's a great device. I use it for reading my RSS feeds every morning on the bus to work (the bus I take, which connects San Jose, CA to Santa Cruz, CA, has free wifi). Google Reader on the 7" 1024x600 screen is MUCH more readable than it is on a 4.1" 800x480 screen.

At some point, I'd love to put in a 2GB RAM module, a 16GBish SSD, and have Mer on it. But right now, I don't have time to do all of those modifications.